Candidates, voters, and voting advice applications

Abstract

Voters often face a complex information environment with many options when they vote in elections. Research on democratic representation has traditionally been skeptical about voters’ ability to navigate this complexity. However, voting advice applications (VAAs) offer voters a shortcut to compare their own preferences across numerous issues with those of a large number of political candidates. As VAAs become more prevalent, it is critical to understand whether and how voters use them when they vote. We analyze how VAA users process and use VAA information about their district candidates with original survey data from the 2019 Danish parliamentary election in collaboration with the administrators of one of the most widely used Danish VAAs. The results demonstrate that VAAs have substantively large effects on their users’ choices between parties and between candidates within parties.